AI and Consciousness: Theoretical Foundations and Current Approaches:
Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the field of consciousness from biological, psychological, philosophical and computational points of view. At the same time, several Artificial Intelligence researchers have designed and implemented systems that take into account the suggestions from the study of consciousness. On one hand, there is the hope of being able to design better AI programs; on the other hand, the actual implementations of working systems could be helpful for understanding consciousness.

The current generation of autonomous robots shows impressive performance with respect to the mechanics and the control of movements. However, these robots, currently at the state of the art in control theory, present limited capabilities of perception, reasoning and action in novel and unstructured environments. A new generation of AI and robotics systems could greatly benefit from research on consciousness in terms of novel approaches for the design of robot sensors and actions modules, of internal and self- representations, and of relevant planning and anticipation capabilities.

The main goal of the symposium was to bring together researchers from AI, cognitive science, philosophy and psychology to reason about the question: can we build better AI and robotics systems by facing the problem of consciousness?